Becca talks about feeling desexualised because of her chronic illness, and how this impacts on her experience of LGBTIQ+ spaces.

Becca was interviewed as part of a group recording led by volunteer Gill Crawshaw and the Leeds Disabled People’s Organisation (LDPO). You can read the full transcript of that interview in our story Disability, sexuality and gender.

TRANSCRIPT

I think, me, in terms of my disability, I have a chronic illness that affects me physically, so I walk with a stick, basically, 99.9% of the time, and I have chronic pain. So I think, for me, one of the things I notice is, when I tell people you have chronic pain, their instant reaction is that you can't be, you mustn't be able to sexual at all. Now...! [laughs]

This kind of becomes a problem when you're in an LGBT space - if you're in a gay bar, anywhere like that - that people just don't, just sense that you're, just don't speak to you, coz clearly you're not capable of doing those things and clearly, like... I once had a, I remember having my mother's friend back home, I went home for a visit. We all went out to the pub together. And they were making jokes about having sex. They had a joke about having sex. And then my mum's friend awkwardly gasped and said, 'No, we can't talk about that in front of Becca!' And I'm like, 'I know what it is, I'm 25 years of age! I'm fully aware of what goes on in the world!' [laughs].

But then it's like, once people get the double-whammy of 'Oh, did you know I'm also gay and identify as bisexual?' And they're like: ‘Whaaat?!’ [laughs]. It kind of like blows their mind. Like, I find that really difficult, difficult to meet somebody because of that. They make instant assumptions by the fact you've got a stick, that you just can't physically engage in those things when you definitely can.